Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')
As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.
You asked:
1. Please supply a count of offences where the "suspect was riding a moped, scooter or motorcycle at the time of the offence" for each of these separate calendar years: A) 2017/18, B) 2016/17, C) 2015/16, D) 2014/15 and E) 2013/14 If possible, please break this down into offences, e.g. violence against the person, robbery, etc.
2. Please supply a percentage figure for the number of these offences (as described above) which resulted in a charge, caution or other proceedings, for each of the separate calendar years: A) 2017/18, B) 2016/17, C) 2015/16, D) 2014/15 and E) 2013/14.
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested at question 1, is not held in a format that allows its retrieval within the permitted time constraints. Initial searches using the keywords specified in this request have brought back in excess of 823 crimes for 2017/18 alone, where those keywords were in the M.O of a crime. Please note that this is no indication that the vehicle was used in the crime. Each of those crimes would require manual review to establish if a suspect was actually riding any of those vehicles at the time of the offence. Even at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record, which we have considered as a reasonable minimum, we have estimated that to extract this information would take well over 27 hours, (this would be considerably more for the remaining years) therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00.
Further time would then be required to extract points 2a)-c)
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under Section 16 of the Act would normally entail that we contact you to determine whether it is possible to refine the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limits. However, from the information we have outlined above I see no reasonable way in which we can do so.
As we are unable to supply a response to point 1 we cannot offer a response to point 2, however I can advise that we would not already hold % figures specific to this request, nor would we be obliged to calculate them.
